PolitiFact Florida: Marco Rubio didn't say he hated the US Senate, but was definitely no fan

Marco Rubio has yet to bow to pressure to reconsider his decision against seeking re-election to the U.S. Senate. But he is pushing back hard against the suggestion that he didn’t like his job in the upper house of Congress.

"Flashback to another article quoting a ‘longtime friend’ saying I ‘hate’ Senate. Words I have NEVER said to anyone," Rubio tweeted on May 16, 2016.

The tweet linked to a Washington Post article put online on Oct. 25, 2015, that quoted an anonymous Floridian friend of Rubio’s as saying the gridlock in the Senate had worn out the freshman senator.

"He hates it," the source said. "I don’t know that ‘hate’ is the right word," Rubio told the newspaper at the time. "I’m frustrated."

Rubio described in the story the plodding pace of the Senate after he was elected in 2010. He said he was forced to "slow-dance and wait" for the Senate to gain a majority in 2012 and 2014 in order to accomplish anything. He said he was then told in 2015 that, "We gotta wait to elect the president" to get any bills passed. The story said that was when Rubio essentially gave up on being a senator.

But was Rubio correct in tweeting months later that he had never said he hated the Senate?

Obviously we can’t check what he may have said in private conversations, so we’ll have to take him at his word there. And we don’t know the name of the source quoted by the Post, so we can’t learn more about that context. But Rubio has made comments that showed he sometimes was less than thrilled about working on Capitol Hill.

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